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Just in case Paxman was in any doubt as to how much he had angered senior management, Mr Cooper – who said he is a fan of Newsnight – added: ‘If all this falls on deaf ears then my only other suggestion is to take the stairs.’

The row came after Paxman launched an astonishing attack on the BBC this week, calling his employer ‘smug’, criticising the payoff scandal and claiming it ‘distorts the marketplace’ with its news operation.

But it was his attack on Radio 1 that ruffled the most feathers at the corporation.

Radio 1 boss Ben Cooper wrote an email to Jeremy Paxman inviting him to 'take the stairs' after the Newsnight presenter said listening to the station's music in lifts was 'hell'

He said: ‘There’s a pile of stuff on the BBC I can’t stand. My idea of hell is going down in one of the lifts in that ghastly new building [New Broadcasting House] in a lift which has Radio 1Xtra plumbed into it. I don’t quite understand why the BBC does Radio 1Xtra.

‘I don’t really understand why it does Radio 1. Clearly, you can meet those needs commercially.’However, Mr Cooper defended his stations and said the BBC’s commercial rivals are unable to provide a comparable service.

He said: ‘Commercial radio targeted at young listeners does not win awards for documentaries about domestic abuse in teenage relationships, it does not have two 15-minute news programmes in its daytime output listened to by more young people than watch the 10 O’Clock News, and it does not play 65 hours of specialist music a week.’

He added: ‘If the licence fee is collected from everyone, then the BBC should represent the whole of society, not just certain parts of it.’

It is understood BBC senior management are increasingly frustrated by stars who criticise the corporation in public.

Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys has claimed the BBC is ‘grotesquely over-managed’ and had a ‘broadly liberal’ bias, while Question Time host David Dimbleby said it was ‘too big for its own good’.

However one BBC source said: ‘The problem is, we hire people like Paxman because they are outspoken and they know their own minds. We don’t want a bunch of yes men in news and we can’t tell them to shut up. But it would be nice if they stopped biting the hand that feeds them.’